ArticleRoyal Society open science2018
Goats prefer positive human emotional facial expressions.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cows react to human emotions displayed in videos and use this information to guide subsequent interaction choices.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Does a Lack of Early Intensive Socialisation with Humans Exclude Goats from Participating in Animal-Assisted Services?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Article
- Article
- Chronic State and Relationship to Humans Influence How Horses Decode Emotions in Human Voices: A Brain and Behavior Study.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Emotional contagion of fear and joy from humans to horses using a combination of facial and vocal cues.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Do goats recognise humans cross-modally?PeerJ · 2025Article
- Expanding perspectives and understanding relational potential: Are mutually beneficial human-animal relationships compatible with current animal agricultural practices?Animal welfare (South Mimms, England) · 2024Review
- Rats respond to aversive emotional arousal of human handlers with the activation of the basolateral and central amygdala.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Horses discriminate between human facial and vocal expressions of sadness and joy.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Horses discriminate human body odors between fear and joy contexts in a habituation-discrimination protocol.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Dogs functionally respond to and use emotional information from human expressions.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Review
- Article
- Can Ponies (Equus Caballus) Distinguish Human Facial Expressions?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Welfare of small ruminants during transport.EFSA journal. European Food Safety Authority · 2022Article
- Cross-species discrimination of vocal expression of emotional valence by Equidae and Suidae.BMC biology · 2022Article
- Cognition and the human-animal relationship: a review of the sociocognitive skills of domestic mammals toward humans.Animal cognition · 2022Review
- Humans and Goats: Improving Knowledge for a Better Relationship.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Review
- Dogs can discriminate between human baseline and psychological stress condition odours.PloS one · 2022Article
- Comparative cognition in three understudied ungulate species: European bison, forest buffalos and giraffes.Frontiers in zoology · 2021Article
- Problem solving in European bison (Royal Society open science · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Domestication has shaped the physiology and the behaviour of animals to better adapt to human environments. Therefore, human facial expressions may be highly informative for animals domesticated for working closely with people, such as dogs and horses. However, it is not known whether other animals, and particularly those domesticated primarily for production, such as goats, are capable of perceiving human emotional cues. In this study, we investigated whether goats can distinguish human facial expressions when simultaneously shown two images of an unfamiliar human with different emotional valences (positive/happy or negative/angry). Both images were vertically attached to a wall on one side of a test arena, 1.3 m apart, and goats were released from the opposite side of the arena (distance of 4.0 m) and were free to explore and interact with the stimuli during the trials. Each of four test trials lasted 30 s. Overall, we found that goats preferred to interact first with happy faces, meaning that they are sensitive to human facial emotional cues. Goats interacted first, more often and for longer duration with positive faces when they were positioned on the right side. However, no preference was found when the positive faces were placed on the left side. We show that animals domesticated for production can discriminate human facial expressions with different emotional valences and prefer to interact with positive ones. Therefore, the impact of domestication on animal cognitive abilities may be more far-reaching than previously assumed.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.